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Page 27
From this it will be seen that habits of indolence, and not the stress
of destitution, are responsible for a great deal of the begging which
goes on in England; but these habits are not answerable for the whole
of it. When times are bad begging has a decided tendency to increase,
and this arises from the fact that a considerable proportion of the
community possess wonderfully few resources within themselves. Even in
depressed times it is astonishing how well men who can turn their
hand, as it is called, can manage to live. Men of this stamp are not
beaten and rendered helpless by the misfortune of losing their usual
employment; they are capable of devising fresh methods of earning a
livelihood; they are persistent, persevering, energetic; they are not
content to stand by with their hands in their pockets and their back
at the wall; at times they even create an occupation, and devise new
wants for the community. Such men exist in large numbers among the
working population, and are able to tide over periods of slackness and
depression in a truly admirable way. But there are others who are
utterly lost the moment trade ceases to flourish. As soon as they lose
the job they have been accustomed to work at they at once sink into a
condition of complete helplessness; knowing not which way to move or
what steps to take; in a very short time they are to be found
soliciting alms in the streets. It is a very serious matter when such
persons are reduced to these straits. With the advent of better times
it is often very difficult to enrol them once again in the ranks of
industry. Bad habits have been acquired, self-respect has broken down,
the mind has become accustomed to a lower plane of existence; the
danger has arisen that persons who were to begin with only beggars by
accident may end by becoming beggars from choice. This is what
actually does happen in some instances, and especially where the level
of life and comfort has at all times been low. The transition from the
one state to the other is not a very pronounced one, and the step into
the position of a habitual beggar is not hard to take after a certain
number of lessons in the mendicant's art have once been learnt. In one
sense it is the pressure of want which has made these people beggars,
in another sense it is their own apathy and feebleness of resource.
It is not easy to estimate the number of persons who become habitual
mendicants in consequence of slackness of work and the temporary loss
of employment. As a matter of fact the whole body of statistical
information bearing upon vagrancy is rather unreliable in character,
and it is difficult to see how it can be anything else. In almost all
cases of begging the initiative is taken by the police; it very seldom
happens that a private citizen gives a beggar in charge. The regular
and systematic enforcement of the Vagrancy Acts by the public
authorities is impeded by a variety of causes, each of which makes it
difficult to grasp accurately the proportions of the begging
population. In the first place no two policemen enforce the law with
the same stringency; one is inclined to be lax and lenient, while
another will not allow a single case to escape. In some districts
chief constables do not care to bring too many begging cases before
the local magistrates; in other districts chief constables are zealous
for the rooting out of vagrancy. In some counties the magistrates
themselves are not so anxious to convict for vagrancy as they are in
others; where the latter tendency prevails, the police take their cue
from the magistrates and comparatively few offences against the
Vagrancy Acts are brought up for trial. Again, there are times when
the public have fits of indulgence towards beggars, which are
counterbalanced at other periods by a corresponding access of
severity; these oscillations of public sentiment are immediately felt
by the executive authorities. The conduct of policemen and magistrates
towards the begging fraternity is largely shaped by the dominant
public mood, and the statistics of vagrancy move up and down in
sympathy with it. Thus it comes to pass that the variations which take
place in the annual statistics of vagrancy do not necessarily
correspond with the growth or diminution of the number of persons
following this mode of life; the actual number of such persons in the
population may in reality be varying very little or, perhaps,
remaining stationary, whilst official statistics are pointing to the
conclusion that important changes are going on. In short, the
statistics of vagrancy are more useful as affording a clue to the
state of public sentiment with respect to this offence than as
offering an accurate test of the extent to which vagrancy prevails.
After this explanation it will be seen how difficult it is, in the
first place, to estimate the exact numbers of the vagrant population;
and, in the next place, the exact proportion of beggars who have been
driven into the ranks of vagrancy, as a result of bad trade and
inability to obtain work. My own impression is, that the number of
persons who are forced to beg for want of work is not large, and they
consist, for the most part, of men beyond middle life or verging upon
old age. There are two causes at present in operation in England which
often press hard upon such men. The first of these causes is one which
was felt more severely twenty or thirty years ago than at the present
moment--I moan the introduction of machinery into industries formerly
carried on to a large extent by hand. One of the most conspicuous
characteristics of the present century is the ever-increasing extent
to which inventions of all kinds have invaded almost every department
of industry. As far as the young are concerned, those inventions have
been on the whole a benefit, and what used to be hard work has become,
as Professor Alfred Marshall recently said, merely looking on. But the
case stands differently with workmen who are surprised by some new
invention at a period of life when the power of adaptability to a
fresh set of industrial circumstances is almost entirely gone. One of
the first consequences of a new invention may be, and often is, that
work which had hitherto been performed by men can now be done by women
and boys; or an occupation which had formerly taken years to learn can
now be mastered in a few weeks. In other cases the new machine is able
to do the work of twenty, fifty, or a hundred men; the article
produced is so immensely cheapened that the old handicraftsman is
driven out of the field; if he is a man entering into years, and
therefore unable to turn his hand to something else, the bread is
practically taken out of his mouth, and the machine, which is
undoubtedly a benefit to the community as a whole, means starvation to
him as an individual. When such circumstances occur, and positive
proof in abundance can be adduced to show that they do take place, the
position of the aged worker becomes a very hard and embarrassing one.
He finds it a very uphill task to change the whole course of his
industrial activities at a period of life when nature has lost much of
her elasticity; the new means he has had to adopt in order to earn a
livelihood are irksome to him; the diminished sum he is now able to
earn per week depresses his spirits and deprives him of certain little
comforts he had long been accustomed to enjoy; but in spite of these
unforeseen and unexpected hardships it is marvellous to see how nobly
working-men, as a rule, struggle on to the end, like a bird with a
broken wing. There are, however, cases in which the struggle is given
up. It would be impossible to enumerate all the causes which lead to
such a deplorable result; sometimes these causes are personal,
sometimes they are social, while in many instances they are a
combination of both. But, whatever such circumstances may be in
origin, the effects of them are generally the same; the worker who is
incapable of adjusting himself to his new industrial surroundings has
few alternatives before him. These alternatives, unless he is
supported by his family or relations, resolve themselves into the
Union, beggary, or theft. Many choose the Union and, with all its
drawbacks, it is undoubtedly the wisest choice; but others have such a
horror of the restraints imposed upon the inmates of a workhouse that
they enter upon the perilous and precarious career of the beggar or
petty thief. The men who make such a choice as this are not, as may
easily be surmised, the pick of their class. They consist, to a good
extent, of persons who have been somewhat unsteady in their habits;
they are not downright drunkards, and they have never allowed drink to
interfere with their regular occupation; but it has been their
immemorial custom to go in for a good deal of drinking on Saturday
nights; on Bank holidays, and other festive occasions. Sensible
workmen do not care to amuse themselves after this fashion; it is
rather too like a savage orgie for most tastes; at the same time it is
the only form of amusement which certain sections of the populace
truly and heartily enjoy, and, on the whole, it is perhaps better that
this rude form of merry-making should remain, than that the multitude
should be deprived of every outlet for the pent-up exuberance of their
spirits. My own impression is, that the rough and boisterous element
which shows itself so conspicuously when the labouring population is
at play will never be eradicated so long as men and women have to
spend so much of their time within the four walls of workshops and
factories, where so much restraint and suppression of the individual
is imperative, if the industrial machine is to go on. It is not at all
unnatural that the severe regularity and monotony of an existence
chiefly spent in this manner should be occasionally interspersed with
outbursts of somewhat boisterous revelry, and the persons who indulge
in it are not to be set down off-hand as worthless characters, because
they sometimes step beyond due and proper bounds. At the same time it
must be admitted that it is generally from the ranks of this class
that the supreme aversion to the workhouse proceeds, and that the
disposition to live by begging, rather than enter it, most largely
prevails. If it happens, therefore, that a man who has lived the life
we have just described is thrown out of employment, by the
introduction of machinery, at a period when he is too old to turn his
hand to something else, he not unfrequently ends by becoming a beggar,
and this continues to be his occupation to the last.
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